Make Believe Bonus: Covering The Crunchyroll Anime Awards

A Peak Behind The Animated Curtain (With Interview Transcripts)

Awards show present a paradox of cultural journalism. Nothing is lower stakes than these kinds of events — doesn’t matter if it’s the Game Awards, the Grammys, or the Academy Awards, these sorts of honors are ultimately meaningless assuming you view art as something more than “someone told me this was the best thing.” Unless you fool yourself into believing a Best Picture statuette lends merit to a work, this is all playtime, underlined by the most noteworthy happenings at these events in the last decade being live performances, screw ups, or slaps.

Yet all the above also makes them important to greater pop cultural discussions, for better or for worse…while also being true outliers in how they bring together a wide variety of notable names together in one place. Red-carpet reporting is hardly something one would need to blow a decade’s worth of journalism school tuition given that, at best, you are getting five minutes with a person. That’s a paltry amount of time to talk to anyone…but, ahhhh, what better challenge for a writer than trying to get something interesting out of such a time constraint? This sort of manic reporting might be the purest test of interview chops for someone in the field…can you ring anything of interest out of a supermaket-check-out length chat with a famous person trained to say nothing of?

This was the challenge I faced from about 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 2, while covering Crunchyroll’s Anime Awards. I stood at the very end of the “orange carpet” — rebranded for the anime streamer’s primary color — and bothered celebrities with questions I thought up on the spot. I was in attendance to reflect on the night’s cultural meaning — I wrote that one for The Japan Times, out now — but for this week’s premium post, I want to take you into the at-times hectic, mostly boring bts version of covering an awards show…particularly one finding an ascendant cultural force / Sony-backed platform trying to elevate itself even further.